I had a little extra bandwidth at work recently and decided to finally dive in and toy around with Selenium for testing automation. To be clear, I ended up looking at Selenium 2 (aka WebDriver) which listed version 2.25 as the latest product. It took a little to get familiar with, but the documentation was pretty easy to navigate. Getting started was as easy as adding a dependency to my Maven project… until it came to running the tests on IE.

Long story short, here’s my setup list:

1. Create a Maven project with the dependencies listed in the tutorial
2. Add a Main class with some test code
3. Download the latest IEDriverServer.exe for your platform from http://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list and add it to your path
4. Disable protected mode in IE across all
   1. Open IE -> Internet Settings -> Security
   2. Across all zones, disable “Enable Protected Mode”
   3. Restart IE

After that, IE should work like a charm. I’m sure Firefox and Chrome will need a little love to get started, but like in most things software IE is the biggest hurdle.